Author
Topic: MailGASM v2.0 (Read 8705 times)

(Credit goes to LordOfGanza for the original idea; see the first MailGASM thread. My personal thanks to Dok Howl for rekindling my enthusiasm for Weirdness by Mail with his Disturbed As Fuck Mailing List)

Pre-Internet Discordianism, I am told, produced a great deal of its stuff by mailing weird text and art from one cabal to another and building upon what they'd sent each other.

I'd like to try and rekindle that old process, but with the assistance of modern technology.

Here's the basic idea:

I will start with a list of mailing addresses volunteered to me by anyone who wishes to participate. I will create some form of Discord-flavored weirdness (a bit of writing, a doodle, maybe a pic; who knows?) and mail it to someone on the list.

A few days later, I will post my little creation in PDF form on a shared Scribd account (if I choose to draw or write something by hand, I'll try and get as high-quality a scan as possible).

When the recipient of my letter gets it, they will make a post in this thread declaring that they've received the letter. They will then make their own addition to the letter (again, as a doodle, a bit of writing, an image, whatever) and mail it to someone else on the list. You can choose for yourself whether or not you announce to whom you are mailing the letter. Try to send it to someone who hasn't gotten it yet!

BEFORE mailing your own letter off, though, try to get a good-quality scan of it and post it as a PDF to Scribd after you mail it off. Obviously, this will be inconvenient or unfeasible for some people, but don't let that discourage you from participating.

The hypothesis here is as follows:

1) We potentially make a really cool bit of Discordiana using a method that has fallen by the wayside in recent years.

2) By posting our submissions as PDFs, we make it possible for someone who's too impatient to wait their turn to grab the latest version (or an earlier version, even) off of the Scribd account and make their own alterations, and mail THAT off. With any luck this will quickly make things really confusing as to which letter is the "original" letter and how many letters are going around at any given time. Hail Eris, and all that.

Anyone who wants to participate should agree to submit their work, both the physical letter and the electronic copy, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, described here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

If you're too lazy to click the link, it means you agree that people can make derivative stuff based on your work (which is kind of the whole point) as long as they credit you the way you want to be credited and don't try to make money off of it.I personally don't care if you credit me or not; the point here is the creative process, not my personal ownership of my piece of it.

Issue that I'd like to see resolved: I don't personally know what is involved in mailing letters overseas, and I don't want to exclude any Discordians from far-away lands if I don't have to!

If anyone wants to participate from outside the USA, you can either:

a) post ITT anything you may know about postage to and from your country (basically, how many stamps did your last letter from the states have on it? :P And what issues have you encountered with overseas postage in the past?)

Also, everything in the OP is basically a rough draft of an idea; if you think there's something that needs to be improved/altered/annihilated with severe prejudice, please share your ideas!

I'm currently brainstorming a way to safely handle all of the addresses. My idea so far is:

Everyone who wants to participate sends me a PM with their mailing address. By doing so, you're agreeing to share this address with everyone else who volunteers their address to me; i.e. no one gets any addresses unless they fess up their own.

I will then compile all of the addresses and send it as a reply PM to everyone who sent me their address. Save this list somewhere so you can check it and choose whom you'd like to send the letter to when you get it.

XpostPeople might be hesitant over how many people will receive their address.How do you plan on distributing the addresses? Mass PM?

Maybe you can make a list and everyone only gets the address of the person below them on the list for purposes of sending.OrYou can send it to person A, they send it back, you send to B, it returns, to C, etc.

Could we merge the two threads? I feel like we're repeating the same conversations in adjacent rooms.

Compile a list of people participating. Post the list. Have them sort out what order it's going to go in. Only send out the following address. You could have people just pm their addy to the person who is supposed to send it to them. Just a suggestion. If you did it that way, I'd participate.

XpostPeople might be hesitant over how many people will receive their address.How do you plan on distributing the addresses? Mass PM?

Maybe you can make a list and everyone only gets the address of the person below them on the list for purposes of sending.OrYou can send it to person A, they send it back, you send to B, it returns, to C, etc.

Could we merge the two threads? I feel like we're repeating the same conversations in adjacent rooms.

I have everyone's addie, pretty much. I could act as an "operator", but only if I'm told by each person that their address can be passed on.

XpostPeople might be hesitant over how many people will receive their address.How do you plan on distributing the addresses? Mass PM?

Maybe you can make a list and everyone only gets the address of the person below them on the list for purposes of sending.OrYou can send it to person A, they send it back, you send to B, it returns, to C, etc.

Could we merge the two threads? I feel like we're repeating the same conversations in adjacent rooms.

I have everyone's addie, pretty much. I could act as an "operator", but only if I'm told by each person that their address can be passed on.

Some people have already sent me their addies, but I'm agreeable to this solution. You have the addresses of just about everyone who would want to participate, and anyone who received a letter from you previously has your return address.

NEW IDEA:

I'll send the letter off to someone who's address I already have, and when they receive it, they'll announce that they've got it ITT and then they can request an address from Dok.

Nope. O:MF and it's subforums are off-limits to non-members. And Googlebot is a non-member, the bitch.

Also I dunno if it was this thread or the other where people asked about how much it costs to send a letter, but I got my envelope from Dok here (sent to the Netherlands) and it has one stamp with the number 98 on it and a tiny silver airplane on it, the picture is of Grand T-something Northern Park, Wyoming (damn those letters are tiny). I dunno if that means it was 98 dollar cents? As for weight, it had one sheet of paper in it.

Also I'm afraid I won't be participating, because I'm already fucking late with my letter to Dok and wouldn't want to hold up another project. But I thought I'd just post these prices, since someone asked.

Yeah I think US to anywhere (except US or canada or Mexico) is basically 98 cents for an ounce (which is 28 grams. I would guess around 10 pieces of paper?). See http://pe.usps.gov/text/Imm/immctry.htm .